1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information providing apparatus for automatically determining the distribution of information such as electronic mail, voice mail, video-on-demand data, facsimile data, and conventional mail, received by a receiver from a sender, and a method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, as computer networks have grown in size and personal computers have become more common, mass-marketing systems using computer communications have been attempted. As examples of such mass-marketing, vendors that provide commodities, services, and so forth may send direct mail such as electronic messages including advertisement information to users. A user receives this direct mail and accesses the content thereof. If the user wants a commodity or the like featured in the direct mail, he or she will order it by a predetermined method.
However, the conventional distributing method for distributing advertisement information has the following problems.
Since a sender of direct mail almost unconditionally sends advertisement information to all subscribers of the computer network, even users who have received the direct mail may not access the contents thereof. In addition, even if the users access the contents of the direct mail, they may not be interested in the commodities featured in the direct mail and may not order them. Thus, the hit ratio of the advertisement for the sender is very low.
Further, advertisement information is one-directionally sent to the users of the computer network, even if the users have not required the advertizing information. Thus, users have to spend a lot of time handling the advertisement information. When the users continuously receive large amounts of advertisement information on vendors or commodities or the like, in which the users are not interested, the user's burden further increases.